AuthorTopic: The Thread on Politics (Read 447869 times)

Though the lot will be closed off to the public, if people — particularly children — get some of the lead contaminated dirt in their mouths, the lead will just pass through their bodies and not be absorbed," the newsletter said. "Without this iron-phosphorus mix, lead poisoning would occur."

Soil chemist Murray McBride, director of the Cornell Waste Management Institute, said he doesn't doubt that sludge can bind lead in soil.

But when eaten, "it's not at all clear that the sludge binding the lead will be preserved in the acidity of the stomach," he said. "Actually thinking about a child ingesting this, there's a very good chance that it's not safe."

McBride and others also questioned the choice of neighborhoods for the studies and why residents were not told about other, possibly harmful ingredients in sludge.

"If you're not telling them what kinds of chemicals could be in there, how could they even make an informed decision. If you're telling them it's absolutely safe, then it's not ethical," McBride said. "In many relatively wealthy people's neighborhoods, I would think that people would research this a little and see a problem and raise a red flag."

The Baltimore study used a compost of sludge mixed with sawdust and wood chips packaged as "biosolids," the term for sludge preferred by government and the waste industry.

"What we did was make the yards greener," said Pat Tracey, a Johns Hopkins University community relations coordinator who recalled helping with the lawn work. "They were bald, bad yards. It was considered sterile fertilizer."

Baltimore environmental activist Glenn Ross says choosing poor neighborhoods destined for demolition makes it hard to track a study's participants. "If you wanted to do something very questionable, you would do it in a neighborhood that's not going to be there in a few years," he said.

HUD documents show the study's lead author, Mark Farfel, has pursued several other studies of lead contamination including the risks of exposure from urban housing demolitions and the vacant lots left behind.

Farfel has since moved to New York, where he directs the World Trade Center Health Registry surveying tens of thousands of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. He denied repeated requests for interviews and referred questions to Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute, the children's research facility that was the recipient of HUD grants with Farfel as project manager.

The institute referred questions to Joann Rodgers, a spokeswoman for Johns Hopkins. She said a review board within its medical school approved the study and the consent forms provided to families that participated. "The study did not test children or other family members living in the homes," she said.

Some of Farfel's previous research has been controversial.

In 2001, Maryland's highest court chastised him, Kennedy Krieger and Johns Hopkins over a study bankrolled by EPA in which researchers testing low-cost ways to control lead hazards exposed more than 75 poor children to lead-based paint in partially renovated houses.

Families of two children alleged to have suffered elevated blood-lead levels and brain damage sued the institute and later settled for an undisclosed amount.

The Maryland Court of Appeals likened the study to Nazi medical research on concentration camp prisoners, the U.S. government's 40-year Tuskegee study that denied treatment for syphilis to black men in order to study the illness and Japan's use of "plague bombs" in World War II to infect and study entire villages.

"These programs were somewhat alike in the vulnerability of the subjects: uneducated African-American men, debilitated patients in a charity hospital, prisoners of war, inmates of concentration camps and others falling within the custody and control of the agencies conducting or approving the experiments," the court said.

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We're not accepting this CHANGE UP in the rules. Period. American presidents have been in the bed with organized crime, corporate pilferers, and the like for years. And all u want to put on this man is that his pastor said "Gotdamn America?" Hell, America.U got off pretty damn well, if you ask me...

Why are you bringing up Clinton? My comment was about Obama. Are you that insecure in your candidate?

can't you just answer my question? What makes Hillary the better candidate? Your criticism of Obama is based on the unknown...Given everything you KNOW about Clinton, I'm curious as to why you perceive her to be a better candidate.

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It is easy to change the language of oppression without changing the sociopolitical situation of its victims.

my problem with Obama right now is the fact that he's backpedaling on his word choices..i think that it's important to get it right the first time as to avoid spin and damage control... one thing that has been made clear is that common sense ain't common

He did get it right the first time...lol he just shouldn't have said it aloud.

can't you just answer my question? What makes Hillary the better candidate? Your criticism of Obama is based on the unknown...Given everything you KNOW about Clinton, I'm curious as to why you perceive her to be a better candidate.

Because she is an evil I know and can deal with. He is an unknown evil that claims to be the agent of change and claims to beyond old school politics. He portrays himself as an honest man and does things like this:

can't you just answer my question? What makes Hillary the better candidate? Your criticism of Obama is based on the unknown...Given everything you KNOW about Clinton, I'm curious as to why you perceive her to be a better candidate.

Because she is an evil I know and can deal with. He is an unknown evil that claims to be the agent of change and claims to beyond old school politics. He portrays himself as an honest man and does things like this:

oh wow....you are unreal. This sloppy-made video is the true distortion.

The video you posted: -------Meredith Vieira: Senator, both you and Senator Clinton have said that Senator McCain favors 100 more years of war in Iraq. Well on Sunday, Frank Rich wrote, “Really, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain.” That in fact Sen. McCain never said he wanted another 100 years of war, he just said he felt American troops should be a long-term presence they way they are in Japan and South Korea. Are willing to admit you’ve distorted his statements?”

Obama: That’s just not accurate, Meredith. We can pull up the quotes on YouTube..."-------Then the video proceeds to insert two speeches by Obama where he states that "McCain suggests that the war might go on another 100 years." Either through intent or retarded-ness, the video editor is somehow trying to imply that Obama is saying that the never made those statements. However, consider the rest of his statement.

More of the clip:

Meredith Vieira: Senator, both you and Senator Clinton have said that Senator McCain favors 100 more years of war in Iraq. Well on Sunday, Frank Rich wrote, “Really, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain.” That in fact Sen. McCain never said he wanted another 100 years of war, he just said he felt American troops should be a long-term presence they way they are in Japan and South Korea. Are willing to admit you’ve distorted his statements?”

Obama: That’s just not accurate, Meredith. We can pull up the quotes on YouTube. What John McCain was saying was, that he is happy to have a potential, long-term occupation in Iraq. Happy may be overstating it. He is willing to have a long-term occupation of Iraq—as long as a hundred years. In fact, he said, 10,000 years. However long it took. That was his argument. The problem is that there’s no end in sight because John McCain has not offered any clear point at which he suggests its time for us to move our troops home

Obama was responding to McCain's remarks about the 100 years Iraq Occupation and is not trying to disown his previous statements. So please....this was a deliberate misrepresentation by a youtube poster and you fell for it. But I guess you can't rape the willing.

I won't even get on the lies behind Clinton's Bosnia/Sniper story. What I really wanted to get at regarding your support for Clinton were the ISSUES!!!

Sen. Barack Obama’s instantly infamous remarks on how small-town Americans “cling” to their faith, their guns, and their xenophobia began drawing attention around 3:30 p.m. Friday.

Obama’s aides went into radio silence, rebuffing requests to explain or respond while his rivals attacked him. At 6:30 p.m., his campaign put out a statement that, instead of explaining his words, threw the criticism back at his rivals. Then, just before 9 that evening, the candidate himself responded during a speech in Terre Haute, Ind., with an attack of his own, expressing incredulity that his rivals had called him “out of touch.”

“Out of touch? Out of touch? I mean, John McCain — it took him three tries to finally figure out that the home foreclosure crisis was a problem,” he said, while also criticizing Hillary Rodham Clinton for her vote on to make declaring personal bankruptcy harder.

“She says I’m out of touch?”

The response was signature Obama: Attack first, sort out the details later, if at all. No apology, no immediate regret, just a sharp counterattack. For a candidate sometimes mocked for being too soft to win a political fistfight, he has shown an uncanny ability to take a punch and then rear back and deliver one in return.

When Obama responds this way, it leaves him open to charges that he's undermining his so-called politics of hope. But, showing remarkable dexterity, he has a knack for using these flare-ups to pivot back to the central theme of his candidacy: that politics is broken, and he knows how to change it.

Obama, it turns out, has been a devout observer of a philosophy future President Bill Clinton laid out in 1981.

"When someone is beating you over the head with a hammer, don't sit there and take it,” then-Gov. Clinton told Time magazine. “Take out a meat cleaver and cut off their hand.”

Many Democrats believe their two most recent nominees, Al Gore and John F. Kerry, ignored that rule, and they are loath to nominate another candidate susceptible to being portrayed as weak. So Obama and his inner political circle — strategist David Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe — have observed it religiously, dispelling an early perception that the candidate would wilt under fire from Clinton or Republicans.

Instead, when under attack, the candidate rarely acknowledges any fault — for such a move would offer critics an opening. In the case of his San Francisco remarks, perhaps the worst gaffe of his career, he conceded Saturday only that “if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that.”

Obama’s unexpected pugnacity also extends to include personal responses to tactical assaults, a level of sparring often left to spokespeople.

The examples are many, but the pattern first began to take shape last summer, after a debate in South Carolina at which Obama said he would personally meet foreign dictators.

The remark appeared to be a slip, and in the spin room after the debate, Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, tried to explain it away.

But the next day, Clinton told the Quad City Times, an Iowa daily, that Obama had been “naïve and irresponsible” to offer meetings, an attack reported on the paper’s website. That afternoon, Obama himself placed a call to the reporter who wrote the story.

It was Clinton, he said, who had been “irresponsible and naïve” to vote to authorize the war in Iraq. And he embraced his promise to meet the hostile leaders, casting Clinton’s reluctance — a line his campaign continued to amplify throughout the fall — as similar to the Bush administration’s stance.

Obama has eagerly pursued other attacks. He memorably mocked Clinton for finding evidence of untoward ambition in his elementary school writings. When Clinton called to “turn up the heat” on the Republicans, Obama suggested “more light” instead.

In late February, reporters traveling with Obama in Ohio learned — before the story hit the wires or the blogs — from Obama’s staff that McCain had accused the Illinois senator of ignorance of the presence of Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq.

Obama, taking the stage at Ohio State University minutes later, responded with vigor.

"John McCain thought that he could make a clever point," said Obama. "I have some news for John McCain. And that is that there was no such thing as Al Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq.”

More recently, when faced with the incendiary video of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, attacking Clinton, followed by more video of the minister’s criticism of America, Obama eschewed the counterattacks. But nevertheless he hewed to a familiar course: no apology, no concession of wrongdoing. His position was that he hadn’t been in the pews for Wright’s reported controversial statements.

Obama’s immediate responses, the campaign quickly decided, were insufficient. And so, just six days later, Obama sought to cast the issue in his own terms with a major speech addressing race, while ignoring Wright’s anti-American comments.

But the most recent flap over his remarks about small-town Pennsylvanians represented a return to form as he moved first to attack Clinton and McCain.

Then came what seemed to be a departure. In a slow-motion rollout that may have slightly prolonged the story, Obama tiptoed up to an apology before returning to his comfort zone. On Sunday evening, with particular glee, he turned to Clinton’s discussion of her childhood hunting.

"She's running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment, she's talking like she's Annie Oakley!” he said at a stop in Pennsylvania. “Hillary Clinton's out there like she's on the duck blind every Sunday, she's packin' a six shooter! C'mon! She knows better. That's some politics being played by Hillary Clinton. I want to see that picture of her out there in the duck blinds.”

Senator Obama has had a mostly charmed Presidential run, but the truth is there's much that Americans still don't know about him or what he believes.

This is so true. More and more is coming out. Will the real Obama please stand up?

What exactly is coming out? Can you name these hidden and surprising elements of Obama's personality or program? If you didn't already know he was an Ivy Leaguer or was going to have some trouble with working-class whites on the campaign trail, I'm not sure what to tell you.

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The "elitism" brand is obviously a real problem for Obama. I'm not his biggest fan, but to me it just looks like the same nasty trick the Republicans (and now Democrats) have been playing since 1980: "The [liberal candidate] wants to tell you why you're bad, take away your guns, and give your money to someone else. Don't trust him because he obviously doesn't understand you and me." What I don't get is how this swipe actually works over and over again. It attached to John Edwards because of his $400 haircut, but he was a guy who grew up poor in the rural south and spends all of his time talking about poverty in empathetic terms and shares the core values of many southern whites. It attached to Kerry because of his patrician accent, rich wife, and inability to speak directly and profoundly about things. It attached to Gore because he was wooden and always did his best to let his audience know he was more intelligent than them. And on and on and on... How many times this is going to work, and for how many different kinds of people? Almost every politician is a rich person with a fancy pedigree. Obama is a guy who grew up with a single mother or his grandparents in Hawaii and just finished paying off his student loans a few years ago. Calling him an elitist next to someone like (Hillary) Clinton, McCain, or Bush just seems silly.

Anyway, religious folks, were any of you offended by the notion that people "cling" to religion out of fear sometimes? I know this is one of the Clinton talking points, but I don't know if or why it is at all effective.

For it, Before She Was Against It04.12.08 -- 11:53PM By Josh Marshall Theda Skocpol writes in ...

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I have been in meetings with the Clintons and their advisors where very clinical things were said in a very-detached tone about unwillingness of working class voters to trust government -- and Bill Clinton -- and about their unfortunate (from a Clinton perspective) proclivity to vote on life-style rather than economic issues. To see Hillary going absolutely over the top to smash Obama for making clearly more humanly sympathetic observations in this vein, is just amazing. Even more so to see her pretending to be a gun-toting non-elite. Give us a break!

I wonder if she realizes that gaining a few days of lurid publicity that might reach a slice of voters is going to cost her a great deal in the regard of many Democrats, whose strong support she will need if she somehow claws her way to the nomination -- and even more so if she does not clinch the nomination. The distribution of "we're not bitter" stickers to her campaign rallies is the height of over-the-top crudity, and the reports are that very few audience members seem to have much enthusiasm for this nonsense. Not surprisingly, people cannot see the reasons for so much fuss.

Yes, she wants a big break, she desperately wants the nomination she and Bill believe is hers by right. We all know that. But where is her authenticity and her dignity and her sense of any proportion?

This has to be one of the few times in U.S. political history when a multi-millionaire has accused a much less wealthy fellow public servant, a person of the same party and views who made much less lucrative career choices, of "elitism"! (I won't say the only time, because U.S. political history is full of absurdities of this sort.) In a way, it is funny -- and it may not be long before the jokes start.

As the rumination continues over Barack Obama's comments about economically-depressed small town voters, statements made by Bill Clinton on the same topic -- uttered while he was running for president in 1991 -- have now surfaced.

"The reason (George H. W. Bush's tactic) works so well now is that you have all these economically insecure white people who are scared to death," Clinton was quoted saying by the Los Angeles Times in September 1991.

A couple months later, Joe Klein, writing for the Sunday Times, reported that Clinton made the following remarks:

"You know, he [Bush] wants to divide us over race. I'm from the South. I understand this. This quota deal they're gonna pull in the next election is the same old scam they've been pulling on us for decade after decade after decade. When their economic policies fail, when the country's coming apart rather than coming together, what do they do? They find the most economically insecure white men and scare the living daylights out of them. They know if they can keep us looking at each other across a racial divide, if I can look at Bobby Rush and think, Bobby wants my job, my promotion, then neither of us can look at George Bush and say, 'What happened to everybody's job? What happened to everybody's income? What ... have ... you ... done ... to ... our ... country?'"

Here's how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it. And when it's delivered by -- it's true that when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter). [...]

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

"A lawyer's either a social engineer or a parasite on society. A social engineer is a highly skilled...lawyer who understands the Constitution of the U.S. and knows how to explore its uses in the solving of problems of local communities and in bettering [our] conditions."Charles H. Houston